(Credits: Storm Thorgerson / Sony Music Entertainment)
Sat 20 December 2025 19:00, UK
It was hard for Pink Floyd to land on the sound that they were happy with. Initially, they fell into the trap of trying too hard to be experimental.
Roger Waters has previously discussed how much he despises the album Piper At The Gates of Dawn, because he felt like the band had no direction and instead were trying too hard to create something experimental. It was for this reason that Jimi Hendrix initially hated new iterations of psychedelic music, as he felt like it had no form and relied too much on lights and chaos.
“Here’s one thing I hate, man,” he said, “When these cats say, ‘Look at the band. They’re playing psychedelic music!’ All they’re doing is flashing lights on them and playing ‘Johnny B Goode’ with the wrong chords. It’s terrible.”
When discussing Pink Floyd specifically, Hendrix added, “I’ve heard they have beautiful lights, but they don’t sound like nothing.”
It’s a shame in that sense that Hendrix was never able to hear the music that Pink Floyd would go on to make. Once Syd Barrett left the band and Roger Waters decided to start focusing on making more conceptual music, they really found the sound that they would wind up championing. Roger Waters has admitted that while he wasn’t a fan of the band’s early work, he enjoyed the period in the build-up to making Dark Side of the Moon, as he felt the band’s ideas were really coming together.
“It’s hard to remember that far back. But I think probably pre-Dark Side Of The Moon. In those days, it was a band. I’m sure that at that point we all agreed about the same things, like, we’ll only play the new material,” said Waters, “We won’t play any of the old material anymore. We’ll only do this album and the one before, and that’s it. There was a certain integrity, and what was important was the work. And that is still exactly how I feel now, although I do confess I do old tunes onstage now.”
One of the songs that really highlighted how well the band were tapping into this new sound was the anthem ‘Time’, something which is elevated by multiple components of the band and that is deeply atmospheric; an element which is often overlooked is the great backing vocals that help to lift the song to the dreamy heights that keeps people coming back to it, but who are the talented singers providing these backing vocals?
So, who sings backing vocals on Pink Floyd’s ‘Time’?
When you’re writing a song about the passage of time and how you often don’t realise it’s slipping away until it’s in the distance, you need to establish a haunting sound which really puts the fleeting nature of time into perspective, managing to achieve this by using the ticking sound of a clock and also layering pretty haunting backing vocals.
Getting the ticking sound was easy. “That was my idea to bring in these recordings of antique clocks, all recorded one at a time, on a portable tape machine, and then we transferred them all onto a multi-track tape, made them all tick and chime in sync,” said Alan Parsons when discussing the song, “Pink Floyd liked that.”
Getting the backing vocals laid down was also relatively simple, as the band used a vocal quartet of session musicians and layered their words, and the backing singers used were Doris Troy, Liza Strike, Barry St John and Lesley Duncan, while someone who also provided a few lyrics here and there on the bridge is none other than Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. All of these vocalists manage to blend their words and create something stunning on a song that even Jimi Hendrix would have adored.
Related Topics